There hasn't been much comment around Sumea about indie game development for Xbox Live Arcade, but hopefully Microsoft's latest announcement will stir up more conversation making smaller games. At the Gamefest 2006 event in Seattle, Microsoft announced XNA Game Studio Express, a set of tools aimed for indie developers, hobbyists, and students in developing games for the Xbox 360 console. Any games made can be shared through a new "Creators Club" service, however regular Xbox 360 users will not be able to access it. Microsoft are touting it as "The Beginning of the Game Developer Revolution", and you can read the press release here.
From Gamasutra...
The details of the new tech are as follows: XNA Game Studio Express will be available for free to anyone with a Windows XP-based PC, and will provide them with what's described as "Microsoft's next-generation platform for game development." In addition, by joining a "creators club" for an annual subscription fee of $99, users will be able to build, test and share their games on Xbox 360, as well as access a wealth of materials to help speed the game development progress.
From the XNA Team blog...
Most people don?t realize this but games are a tough business. As the graphics quality bar rises, so does the art costs. Many games are better looking than they are fun and their sales suffer while the costs soar. Most games lose money while a few make lots. Hopefully, the ones that make money make enough to cover all of the ones that lose.This creates a situation where the industry is afraid to try anything really innovative. Certain game play styles and genres sell in a ?predictable? sort of way and, thus, appear to have less financial risk associated with them. This is why we see so many sequels on the market, so many copycat games, and so few real innovations...
The big XNA announce at GDC in 2004 was really about a project to fix some of the deep issues in the industry...
I think there is a reason why publishers try and take the 'generic gaming appraoch', and thats plainly because of two main things:
1. Because games cost truckloads nowadays. Even a small simple title can cost alot in resources / time. Look at the PC for this as a good example of how diluted the indie game development arena currently is - indie games only really succeeding on very small scale projects.
2. Because the average gamer doesnt care - they want 30 mins of 'out time' and the actual gameplay isnt overly relevant for them unlike core gamers. The average gamer wants a sports title, or a driving title they can play a bit, and enjoy a stint at the console.
Just have a read of the latest ESA report to see the top selling titles of last year - of the 20 titles, the high majority were classic franchises, and sporting games (Sims, StarWars, Maddens etc). So its not just that publishers are making games that may appear non-innovative, its that people actually want them. It should also be noted, that these top 20 games all sold around 3x the amount of last years top 20.
So while I think its great that people will be able to develop on Xbox Arcade, it really doesnt mean anything, and is simply another revenue source for MS ($99 each for no real cost to them, is a pretty nice deal in their case). It should be noted that Sony has been enticign homebrew / hopbby developers to playstation for years (Since Yaroze on PS1). and while the PS1 and PS2 have had some small successes with homebrew developers, it really only supports a fairly small niche audience, and market. What it does do, is blow alot of marketing up on the websites.. so MS gets some "hey hey look at us" type advertising, at a time the PS3 rollout is starting to gather some steam (Btw the PS3 will be able to developed upon from out of the box :) - so I suspect thats why this annoucement has occured).